the books I read in Greece
aka introvert recovery on a trip with 11 teenagers, aka one of the most important parts of visiting a new place
On the long flight from Charlotte to Frankfurt, and Frankfurt to Munich (why), and Munich to Thessaloniki, I read Madeline Miller’s Circe on my Libby app. It seemed like the right thing to do. It seemed like I was probably the last person in the world who hadn’t read it.
I understand why it is beloved, I guess, and I didn’t mind a little refresher on some of the main players in Greek mythology, but I was not captivated. Feminist-retelling-paint-by-number.
In pieces in my office before the trip and in the snatches of minutes on bus rides before I fell asleep, I skimmed Douglas Campbell’s Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, hoping that it would be, as the blurbs promised, a “lively personal portrait” of the man, a “racy, page-turning blockbuster on the apostle.”
Well, racy it was not. It might be a good book to use if you were drafting an adult Sunday school class on the main themes of the Apostle Paul’s life and letters, but it really didn’t provide the context I was looking for, the kind of cultural and biographical insight that would deepen my experience of being on the ground in Philippi and Corinth and Berea and Thessaloniki.
Ferrying to Hydra, I borrowed Julia’s hardback library copy of The Labors of Hercules Beal by Gary Schmidt, and I finished it by the time we returned to the hotel that evening.
This middle-grade novel tells the story of a seventh grade boy whose eccentric ex-Marine homeroom teacher gives him the assignment of performing the Twelve Labors of Hercules in real life, and writing about it.
I cried. I will probably be buying this one for some kids in my life.
Finally, and mostly unrelated to Greece, I read Robin Sloan’s Moonbound. I had preordered it because I loved his weird novel Sourdough so much (I wrote about it for Image some years back). Moonbound falls within the Sourdough universe, just millennia later; the unexpected protagonist (or antagonist, I guess, depending on your perspective) of sourdough microbes in the earlier novel are a distant relative of the narrator of this fantasy/sci-fi mashup, who describes himself as “a hearty fungus onto which much technology has been layered, at extraordinary expense,” and who takes up residence inside Moonbound’s protagonist Ariel.
I know: that sentence doesn’t make any sense. I’m sorry. Here, read the Kirkus summary. Moonbound is set in a future in which AI dragons have conquered humanity. A wizard created Ariel, our hero, in order for him to reenact the story of the sword in the stone; but he refuses, and changes the story. (Or does he?) The novel asks: what comes after the Anthropocene; and does the universe have a preference for plot?
Overall, this was maybe a 7.5/10 for me, but I did like reading it in Greece because it imagines the ways that our myths might live on and mutate, and Greece is certainly the right place to think about that.
Before leaving for Greece, of course I had reread some Cavafy (“Hope your road is a long one”) and some Sappho, and I had looked for other poets to accompany me on my journey to Ithaka. At Mr. K’s, my favorite used bookstore in East Asheville, I found Yannis Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile, poems written from a concentration camp following the Greek civil war in the mid twentieth century.
I don’t think I could have told you, before I picked up this book, that there was a civil war in Greece 70 years ago.
I wonder how it feels to live in a country filled with tourists who love your ancient history and know nothing about your modern history.
Here’s a poem, dated May 31, 1950.
Kaiti writes:
in your garden the roses have run riot
yellow and white daisies
tall as you are
we washed the windows and the chandelier
your room smells of soap
I caressed your clothes and your books.
Ah Kaiti
we here
at the edge of our handkerchief
tied tight as a knot our vow to the world.
I almost left Greece without visiting a single bookstore (such is the life of a highly structured tour with teenagers, I guess). But on my last day in Athens, having spied Little Tree, I cut my shower time short to slip over there, and wished I could stay longer. I came home with some George Seferis (“the Greek TS Eliot”) and The Delphic Endeavor, by Angelos Sikelianos, a man who organized pan-religious festivals in Delphi in 1927 and 1930, believing that a spiritual renaissance was what humanity needed.
More about Greece shortly, perhaps. Is it a real place?
Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.
I listened to The Labors of Hercules Beal a couple months ago. I love everything I've read by Gary D. Schmidt!